Glennon Doyle - Untamed

A woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter. When she finally understands that she is creating something different from what her parents created. When she begins to build her island not to their specifications but to hers. When she finally understands that it is not her duty to convince everyone on her island to accept and respect her and her children. It is her duty to allow onto her island only those who already do and who will walk across the drawbridge as the beloved, respectful guests they are.

Tonight, sit down with your cobuilder and decide with honor and intention what you will have on your island and what you will not. Not who your nonnegotiables are but what they are. Do not lower the drawbridge for anything other than what you have decided is permitted on your island, no matter who is carrying it.

Right now, you are being required to choose between remaining an obedient daughter and becoming a responsible mother.

Choose mother. Every damn time from here on out, choose mother.

Your parents had their turn to build their island.

Your turn.

Dear Glennon,

I just brought my baby girl home from the hospital. When I put her down on the floor in her carrier, I forgot how to breathe. I don’t know how to do this. I am so afraid. My mother didn’t love me well. At least once a day I think, Why couldn’t she love me? Was there something wrong with her…or me? What if it was me? How will I ever know how to mother my daughter if I’ve never known mothering love?

H

Dear H,

This is what I know.

Parents love their children. I have met no exceptions.

Love is a river, and there are times when impediments stop the flow of love.

Mental illness, addiction, shame, narcissism, fear passed down by religious and cultural institutions—these are boulders that interrupt love’s flow.

Sometimes there is a miracle, and the boulder is removed. Some families get to experience this Removal Miracle. Many don’t. There is no rhyme or reason. No family earns it. Healing is not the reward for those who love the most or best.

When a parent becomes healthy again, her child begins to feel her love. When the boulder is removed, the water flows again. It’s the way of the river, the way of a parent’s love.

Your parent—your sister, your friend, the one who couldn’t love you—her love was impeded. That love was there—swirling, festering, vicious in its desperation for release. It was there, it is there, all for you. That love exists. It just couldn’t get past the boulder.

You can trust me about this because I have been an impeded river. The boulder of addiction blocked my love, and all my family felt from me was pain and absence. My dad used to ask, Why, Glennon? Why do you lie to my face and treat us so terribly? Do you even love us?

I did. I felt all the love swirling and festering and the pressure of it all felt like it would kill me. But they couldn’t feel any of it. To them, it didn’t exist.

Then I got my Removal, sobriety, which was both a spontaneous miracle and excruciatingly difficult work. Eventually my love was able to flow to my people again. Because I was always the river, not the boulder.

Desperate people often ask me, “How? How did you get sober? What did your family do?”

They tried everything, and none of it had anything to do with my recovery. All the love in the world cannot move a boulder, because the Removal is not between the impeded and the ones who love her. The Removal is strictly between the impeded one and her God.

I am so sorry, H.

You deserved to have the love of your mother delivered to you. You deserved to be soaked through to the bone with her love every day and every night.

But now I need you to listen to me.

The miracle of grace is that you can give what you have never gotten.

You do not get your capacity for love from your parents. They are not your source. Your source is God. You are your own source. Your river is strong.

Soak that baby girl of yours to the bone day and night.

Flow unimpeded.

During my Love Warrior book tour, thousands of readers showed up across the country, expecting me to do what I always did: tell the truth about my life. But for the first time in a decade, they didn’t yet know the truth of my life. I had shared that Craig and I were divorcing, but I had not told them that I had fallen in love with Abby.

I had a choice to make: I could reveal my new relationship before I felt ready, or I could stand in front of my readers and hide the most important thing happening in my life. The first option felt terrifying and also the clear way, because of my One Thing. My One Thing is my sobriety. For me, sobriety is not just about stopping something; it’s about beginning a particular way of life. This way of life requires living in integrity: ensuring that my inner self and outer self are integrated. Integrity means having only one self. Dividing into two selves—the shown self and the hidden self—that is brokenness, so I do whatever it takes to stay whole. I do not adjust myself to please the world. I am myself wherever I am, and I let the world adjust.

I will never promise to be this way or that way, I will only promise to show up, as I am, wherever I am. That’s it, and that’s all. People will like me or not, but being liked is not my One Thing; integrity is. So I must live and tell my truth. Folks will come around or quit coming around. Either way: lovely. Anything or anyone I could lose by telling the truth was never mine anyway. I’m willing to lose anything that requires me to hide any part of myself.

So I decided to tell the world that I was in love with Abby. The night before I made my announcement, one of my teammates said, “Here we go. Tomorrow is the bloodbath.” I understood the trepidation. I knew that folks would be surprised and that they’d have a whole lot of questions and feelings.

Some would say with admiration, “I respect the hell out of you. What gave you the guts to do that?” Others would say with disdain, “I respected the hell out of you. What gave you the right to do that?”

I knew my answer would be the same, either way:

I left my husband to build a life with Abby for the same reason I left booze to become a mother eighteen years ago. Because suddenly I was able to imagine a truer, more beautiful existence for myself than the one I was living. And my way of life is to dare to imagine the truest, most beautiful life, family, and world—and to then conjure up the courage to make real what I have imagined.

In my thirties, I learned that there is a type of pain in life that I want to feel. It’s the inevitable, excruciating, necessary pain of losing beautiful things: trust, dreams, health, animals, relationships, people. This kind of pain is the price of love, the cost of living a brave, openhearted life—and I’ll pay it.

There is another kind of pain that comes not from losing beautiful things but from never even trying for them.

I’ve felt that kind of pain in my life. I recognize it on others’ faces. I see the longing in the eyes of a woman who is next to her lover but feels totally alone. I see the rage in the eyes of a woman who is not happy but smiles anyway. I see the resignation in the eyes of a woman who is slowly dying for her children instead of living for them. And I hear it. I hear it in the bitterness of a woman who describes faking it so she can get up and finish folding the laundry. I hear it in the desperate tone of a woman who has something to say but has never said it. In the cynicism of a woman who has accepted the injustice she could help change if she were braver. It’s the pain of a woman who has slowly abandoned herself.